"PLIMPELOMIE" for Oboe

“PLIMPELOMIE,” one page from an upcoming score for oboe, advances my ongoing “sound formulary” by treating the page like a drug label and a dose chart rather than a staff alone. The six line stave with arrowheads reads as a vector table for breath, pressure, and time. Five lines measure tradition. The added line widens the clinical range and invites the performer to think in titrations rather than fixed steps. Arrows act like tapered syringes, pointing the phrase toward an endpoint where residue and after-effects still matter.

The pill image operates as both icon and prescription. Concentric rings suggest cross-sections of a capsule and also targets for embouchure aim. Each ring can be read as a register band or dynamic band, a way to center or decenter tone. The glossy pill at the top functions like a brand panel on a blister pack. It names the compound and announces its intended intensity, yet the name is invented and therefore semantically unstable. That instability is the music’s engine. Phonemes in “PLIMPELOMIE” guide tongue placement and airflow, a soft plosive followed by liquid consonants that suggest onset, swirl, and release in the reed.

Across the middle, black and white blot structures recall chromatography or Rorschach plates. They imply interactions rather than single notes. The oboist is invited to read them as contraindications and synergies: multiphonics that should not occur in isolation, fluttered tremors that alter timbral absorption, micro-glissandi that smear like solvent. The faint botanical tracings around the orbs look like excipient lists. They are the non-active materials that still shape how the active ingredient dissolves, which here means how spectral debris colors the principal pitch.

This notation proposes a performer’s pharmacovigilance. Breath becomes dosage, articulation becomes delivery route, decay becomes half-life in the room. The six line stave with arrows provides a scaffolding for precise trials, while the neologism and pill imagery insist on affect and brand, the way music is felt and remembered.

 “PLIMPELOMIE” is not a metaphor for medicine. It is a disciplined map that lets the oboist compound timbre and time into audible therapy, with evaluation occurring in the ear that listens for side effects as carefully as it listens for pitch.